Mpumalanga hotel apologises over apparent racist “blacks” bill

This Mpumalanga hotel has admitted fault after a video went viral showing a bill marked with the words "blacks". We have the video and statement.

One thing South Africa has definitely not left behind in 2017: Racism. While the issues around race are still a huge sensitive point for South Africans, the year has kicked off on the wrong foot with one incident in Mpumalanga.

A Pretoria man and his family were visiting the Royal Hotel in Pilgrim’s Rest on New Year’s day. They had their meal and called for the bill. Once it arrived, they noticed that the bill was marked “blacks”. The family confronted a waiter and later a manager who then told them that the word was used to describe the tables that “were colour coded”. Of course, as the family argued, this does not fully make sense as the table may then have been marked “black”.

In the video below, the family can be seen confronting the manager.

https://youtu.be/Fsbhgij12yE

With the video getting thousands of shares and comments, the hotel has reached out to the family and has issued a statement apologising.

Traveller24 spoke to the Royal Hotel. The hotel then admitted that they do not colour code tables at the restaurant.

“The Royal Hotel MRTT unreservedly apologises to our customers regarding the incident on 01 January 2018. The Hotel wishes to distance itself from any allegations of racism.

“The Hotel has a clear policy of non-discrimination on the basis of race, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age or marital status. Employee statistics of The Royal Hotel are 96% black employees and 4% white employees.”

“We do not yet know why our Waiter chose to describe this particular table in the way he did, neither do we know why the Manager on duty chose to inform our guests that we have systems that do not in fact exist.

“We will, however, establish these facts using our robust internal system. We can confidently state that we are proactive in eliminating discrimination within our environment.

“We are currently working with the family to resolve this issue and internal procedures are being followed with the Waiter and Manager who were on duty.”

The family says that even though they will accept an apology, they want to expose this kind of behaviour.